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The title of this little piece is a question. At the outset, however, let me say that I do not pretend to have all the answers to the question, and even those answers that I will propose are only partial and debatable. But, and perhaps this is the more significant point, it is a different question from the one that I started out to answer.
For at first, having observed and participated in many efforts to improve braille codes over the last twenty-five-plus years, I found it more natural to ask: "What are we doing with braille now, and where are we taking it?" As happens often -- too often ---, it was younger minds that helped me to see the matter differently. (My wife Gen and I are not quite finished raising seven children. Along the way, so many of my preconceptions have been demolished that I have been forced to admit it: the "raising" part works both ways.) This time, the occasion of insight was a delightful little book, lent to me by my daughter Kathy, entitled "Children's Letters to God" (compiled by Stuart Hample and Eric Marshall, published by Workman). Since I've been enjoying the role of grandfather for just a few years now, I'm sure she had in mind kidding me a bit with the likes of this one:
Dear God My Grandpa says you were around when he was a little boy. How far back do you go? Love Dennis
That got me reading, anyway, and I eventually came across this equally thoughtful question:
Dear God, Did you mean for giraffe to look like that or was it an accident. Norma
That not only rated a chuckle but struck a chord, because I have often asked, or have myself been asked, why braille uses this or that symbol, or this or that rule. And when we ask such questions, we all tend immediately to seek answers in terms of the design concepts and intentions that were in the minds of those people who made the rules, including countless committees that have labored since the time of Louis Braille himself. That may be natural enough, but too much of that kind of thinking can cause us to miss the fact that the inner nature of braille, together with the environment in which braille must function as a useful tool, may as much as anything compel the direction that it takes. In other words, braille may be regarded as evolving, more or less on its own terms, though subject to the dynamics of evolution generally.
In retrospect, I should not have been surprised at this new way of seeing the issue, because in my own work with braille I have noticed a tendency for braille to assert its own nature, no matter what else I may have had in mind. Going back to the 1969 beginning, my original motive was to work on something that would be actually and directly useful. Up until then, much of my working life had been spent on military-oriented projects that, while perhaps contributing to a necessary preparedness, were not immediately useful and one could only pray that they never would be used. However, seeking the satisfaction of usefulness is not exactly unselfish, and when Bob Gildea, a blind coworker at MITRE, persuaded me to join his project to prove the feasibility of translating English literary braille automatically, I confess that I thought of us as "helping" a technology that was probably in its last few years of usefulness. That project, called DOTSYS, was not only to be a success for the four of us who carried it out, but a gradual awakening for me personally, as to the richness and depth of this apparently simple six-dot system. Since the founding of Duxbury Systems in 1975, I and my colleagues there have had the pleasure of working on the automatic translation of braille codes for many other languages and notation systems -- always with others, whose knowledge of those languages and associated braille codes is just as important as our efforts in programming. With each such project, we learn a bit more about the ways in which blind people everywhere use braille to meet their needs, and thus how it is different everywhere while remaining the same in its essential properties. In other words, it has turned out that braille itself has done most of the teaching and "helping".
In suggesting that braille can be regarded as evolving, I do not mean to contrast the term "evolution", with its connotations of randomness, and the term "design". Braille was certainly designed and continues to be -- and yet the dynamics of evolution apply because not all possible designs work equally well in the long run. Like any evolving system, our designs and changes in design for braille tend to take place in response to a need, to be enabled (or constrained) by environmental factors, and to be guided by the inner nature of the system itself. We may think of ourselves as shaping braille according to some grand vision of our own, but it is just as valid to view braille itself as adapting to changing needs, while we play the role of assistants to the process.
Evolution does not always imply rapid change, nor even constant change, only the constant possibility of change. The shark, for instance, is said to have changed very little from the form that it achieved a very long time ago, mainly because it has remained a scarcely challenged success in that form. Nevertheless, it remains one of the few permanent truths that changing external conditions, giving rise both to new needs and to new opportunities, require adaptive changes in all organisms and systems -- only the rate of change may vary. As Ann Morrow Lindbergh once put it, "Only in growth, reform and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found."
When change is needed, the opportunities that permit change may themselves be new, or even the same factors that gave rise to the need for change. But in all cases, the adaptation that works is determined by the inner nature of the evolving organism, as well as the external opportunities. David Attenborough, in his book "Life on Earth", describes such adaptation processes taking place over and over. For example, when the first tall forests created problems for earth-bound animals by shading their forage into scarcity, some of those smaller animals learned to climb the trees. Later, larger animals were faced with the same basic problem but their body size and other inherent characteristics made tree-climbing impractical. Consequently, instead of climbing, some of them grew longer necks, and today we call them giraffes.
So if we were to attempt to answer Norma's letter (which I admit is pretty presumptuous, considering to Whom she addressed it!), we would have to say that the giraffe is no accident.
Likewise with braille, the changes we are considering at the present time are made necessary by inexorable changes in the world around us, are fortunately also enabled by many such changes, and are ultimately shaped by the inner nature of braille itself -- that is the logic and aesthetics of the system that come through in braille regardless of the time period, language or code.
In mentioning changes that are being considered, I think first and foremost of the Unified Braille Code (UBC) Research Project. UBC is undoubtedly the most important proponent for change in English Braille at the present time, both in terms of the number of people involved and the scope of the changes it seeks to bring about, especially for the transcribing of technical material. The UBC is being coordinated by the International Council on English Braille, and chaired by CNIB's own Darleen Bogart. If UBC's goals are fully realized, there will be a single worldwide braille code for English-speaking people, encompassing both literary and technical subjects, where now some five different codes are used. Who knows, we might no longer need to ask, as did this letter writer:
Dear God, Who draws the lines around the countries? Nan
I will not dwell too long on the current need for this kind of unification, since the many reasons have already been well presented elsewhere, which is why we have a UBC project already in existence. In summary, there are two main factors: First, the literature of today is increasingly not neatly divisible into the categories that are reflected in our present braille codes -- i.e. general literature here, math over in that corner, and computer notation over on that other shelf. Instead, all these notations commonly appear together even in general literature, such as newspapers and magazines, and in textbooks on other subjects. Second, blind people are increasingly educated and employed in the same environments as their sighted peers. This situation makes it necessary for most literature to be accurately and interchangeably expressible in either braille or print, with a minimum of fuss or demands upon the users of either medium to know a great deal about the other.
The factors currently enabling change in braille are also generally well known, and so I will only summarize them here. Computers, and the programs that run on those computers to convert between print and braille, are improving all the time. Hardware that provides for the physical embossing and display of braille has also improved dramatically, and we all await the day when an affordable full-page braille display will make true two- dimensional braille easily portable in quantity. At the same time, for reasons mostly unrelated to braille, the overall volume and availability of materials in computer-readable form is expanding exponentially. We can thank scanners, the Internet, and many other familiar artifacts of the Information Age for much of this. Perhaps best of all, it is possible to do more with this material than ever before, because text markup standards such as SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) are making it possible to identify the various distinct elements within the text -- different levels of heading, for instance -more quickly and accurately. Let me hasten to add here that the people who work with (and sometimes around) these computers are not losing their importance in this process, but on the contrary are gaining in importance and productivity through improvement in the available methods.
But, while the need for change derives mostly from changes in literature and the circumstances of readers, and while the possibilities for change largely center about the use of computers, the direction that the changes will take is importantly influenced by the nature of braille itself -- its inner logic and aesthetics. What do we mean by the logic and aesthetics of braille? Most of the basic logic is fairly obvious after just a little working with any braille system. We could start with braille's "six- dotness", and reflect on the fact that the years have shown that that particular number of dots, corresponding to a certain size braille character or cell, has remained the best balance for most purposes even though it allows for only 64 distinct combinations. (This is not to deny the value of 8-dot or other systems for certain special purposes, but that subject would take me too far afield here.) From there, the logic of assigning meaning to each of those combinations starts out rather simply. Individual braille characters often just stand for individual print symbols -- a particular two-dot character for the letter "b", for instance, in Western languages, or the corresponding letter ("beta", "beh" etc.) in other languages such as Greek, Arabic or Hebrew. A certain three-dot is commonly used for the exclamation mark, and so on. However, since there are only 64 distinct braille symbols, and there are many more than 64 symbols that need distinguishing, the logic of braille cannot stop there but must become a little more complicated. One common device is to use certain braille characters as "prefixes" to modify the meaning of one or more following characters. Thus, for example, a certain single-dot character before the one that stands for "b" indicates that it is a capital B, whereas without that prefix a lower-case b is implied. Likewise, a certain "numeric indicator" character, preceding the same two-dot character that is normally read as "b", would alter its interpretation so that it means the digit "2". This concept, which we have come to call the "prefix- root" principle, and the broader concept that interpretation of braille characters may depend in part on context, form very obvious parts of the logic of braille.
But is there more to it than that? Are there more subtle aesthetic principles as well? I am convinced that there are, although I will confess that many of them, although no doubt sensed implicitly by many braille readers, were not clear to me until recently -- and I am not sure about all of them yet. Here I must sympathize with one of the children, who took her frustration right to the source with this letter:
Dear God, I read the bible. What does begat mean? Nobody will tell me. Love, Alison
I suppose that it is usually hard for a regular braille reader to explain to a sighted person like myself just what aesthetics apply to braille, but I recall one gentleman who managed to get his point across with one syllable. This was about two years ago, at a presentation where some of us on the UBC project had just handed out some braille samples, including the proposed symbols for parentheses that our UBC committee had defined at that time. As some of you may recall, both the opening and closing parentheses each comprised two cells, a two-dot prefix together with a 5-dot root. This one reader rose, asked for the explanation to be repeated in order to be sure he was reading the symbol correctly, and simply said "Ugh!". (Thanks to the "gh" contraction, that word is particularly succinct in braille -- just two characters!) Though the prefix-root logic of the symbols was impeccable, I began to sense that something more was involved. A few months later, another reader reacted negatively to our then-proposed question mark, which had a dot in the uppermost part of the cell, pointing out that such punctuation marks are commonly "lower signs" that do not have such upper dots. It began to dawn on me that what these people were talking about went beyond those particular symbols, and had something to do with the weight or "dot density" and placement of various kinds of symbols as they appear within an overall text -- what gives rise to a certain rhythm or harmony in the reading process, or in other words the aesthetics of braille.
Looking at the braille system as originally laid out by Louis Braille himself, it can be seen that some subtler aspects of the logic of braille are inextricably intertwined with aesthetics. The top rows of Louis Braille's seven-line arrangement are characterized by configurations that have upper and left-hand dots, which are the most easily read on their own or in sequence. Those characters are the ones assigned to the most important symbols, i.e. the letters of the alphabet. Signs with only lower dots or right-hand dots are mostly assigned ancillary or connecting roles, such as for punctuation marks, where they will be seen as contrasting with the principal symbols. That practice also means that the lower signs are also more easily recognized, that is they are less likely to be read as if they were in the upper cell, because in "supporting" roles they normally occur in close proximity to the principal symbols instead of being isolated. Of these, the characters that are dominated by right- hand dots are most often used as prefixes, since they are most easily recognized when a principal symbol occurs closer to those dots, that is on their right.
Thus our use of the prefix-root principle in UBC, while applied more consciously and rigorously than in previous codes, is nevertheless consistent with a logical principle that has been in braille all along. Likewise our assignments to upper and lower symbols, and relatively dense and light dot combinations, have been in accordance with the aesthetics of braille, to the best of our ability given the many objectives and constraints of UBC. I've been fond of saying, of our UBC efforts, that we are trying not to throw the baby out with the bath water. But, given my thesis here, I guess I have to admit that, even if we had wished to do so, the baby would have refused to be thrown out. Anyway, as you may have guessed, the UBC proposed symbols for parentheses have long since changed to a "lighter" pair (each symbol comprising a one-dot prefix with three-dot root), and the proposed symbol for the question mark has changed back to the current three-dot lower sign. (Perhaps this is a good time to mention that UBC is still an ongoing research project, and so anything I mention about it here is not necessarily final, nor is it certain that any form of UBC will be adopted when the project is finished.)
So, is everyone thrilled with the changes so far projected for UBC? Well, no. Some think we are tinkering with a working system and want no change or much less change, others want about the same amount of change but not the same changes that we propose, and still others think we are not going far enough and would prefer to start from scratch. In retrospect, all this seems natural and even healthy, up to a point. We shouldn't expect to please everyone, in any case, because even God doesn't measure up to that impossible standard, as evidenced by this child's letter:
Dear God, Thank you for the baby brother but what I prayed for was a puppy Joyce
Probably the largest problem we have is that some people expect too much of a Unified Braille Code -- that it will completely obviate the need for any special codes while unambiguously expressing all areas of notation, yet be just as efficient as their favorite special-purpose braille code for that special purpose -- in other words, that it will solve all problems at no cost. Such a code would certainly be revolutionary if it were possible, but alas it is not. In any event, in accordance with the perspective that I have tried to present here, I believe that the changes coming in braille, whether it be through UBC or something else, will more properly be seen as evolutionary, not revolutionary.
Braille will not change its nature but will express itself throughout a significant evolutionary step. Boundaries between certain commonly used notation systems will be moved, so that a single code embraces them all. For similar reasons, we'll see a reduction in the differences in braille that now occur in different geographical areas. We may even see some coming together between different languages: in particular, we have been encouraged by the fact that there has been some interest in using the technical portions of UBC for languages other than English. However, not all boundaries will be eliminated. There will undoubtedly remain many highly specialized subject areas that, if they are to be pursued intensely, and particularly if frequent manipulation of the notation is required, will warrant specialized braille codes that will remain at best on the periphery of UBC. They will be somewhat consistent, we hope, but still distinct. Subjects such as bell-ringing, Mayan glyphs, and chess come immediately to mind, but of course there are no end of these. Some of these subject areas already employ special notations in print or braille or both.
There is a rather trivial, but perhaps for that reason all the more illustrative, example of this phenomenon: a "braille calendar code" that can be used for really compact braille calendars. This calendar code takes advantage of the fact that the only thing that needs to be expressed in the body of a calendar are spaces and the day numbers 1 through 31. (Regular braille would be used for other parts of the calendar, such as the month and year heading.) With literary code, 4 cells would normally be needed for each of the two-digit day numbers (which govern the overall width because of the vertical alignment requirement): a numeric indicator, the two digits, and a space. In a possible variant, the space or the number sign could be considered to be implied, and thus omitted, in which case the required size would be reduced to 3 cells per number. That would be the same width as any of our current technical braille codes, and not bad considering that print also requires 3 character positions. But calendar code does a lot better than that: it gets both digits into a single cell and does away with the space, for a 3-to-1 advantage in efficiency! This actually not so difficult, because it is certainly possible to represent 32 distinct things when one has 64 characters to work with. (For those interested in the technical details: The one's place of the required number is expressed in the upper four dots of the cell, using the same combination as the regular literary digit, while the ten's place, which can only be 0 through 3 for this application, is expressed by one of the four possible combinations within the two bottom dots.) Separation between neighboring numbers becomes unnecessary with this single-cell representation, allowing pocket braille calendars to be just 7 cells wide, and of course it is easy to imagine other applications, such as compact schedules of various kinds, for this simple yet efficient scheme. What are we to make of this? The point is: when a need for extreme efficiency is perceived as paramount, and when it is possible to take advantage of a very limited domain of discourse to achieve such efficiency, then special codes such as calendar code make perfect sense and are bound to arise. Most such codes are and will remain outside any general code such as UBC, yet that fact does not negate the far greater value of general codes, nor should it unduly influence their design. In summary, then, I envision braille evolving towards a lowering, removal or at least moving of the barriers between different codes, to the point where no broad areas, beyond the base codes for natural languages, remain separate. Special codes will still be used, however, in some narrow areas. Braille conversion in both directions will increasingly be automated, and will not require human braille experts in simple cases. Yet those expert workers, while also using semi-automated methods themselves, will be increasingly in demand to handle more complex cases. Through it all, braille will retain its essential character, continuing to meet the needs of its readers, including the new challenges of literature and environment, just as it has for over 150 years. Those of us involved in the design process will go along for the ride, and continue to imagine that the steering wheel is firmly in our hands.
It won't necessarily be an easy ride all the way, because sincere people sometimes disagree on the best way to proceed, even when they agree on general principles. We all hope to make the future better for the children of today. Yet no one can know for sure what will eventually work best for those children because, as Kahlil Gibran said, they "dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams". Perhaps that is why I've enjoyed "Children's Letters to God" so much -- because it so often affords a hopeful glimpse of that distant house, which the children earnestly pray to be free of war, poverty, or any other needless limitation to fulfillment of the human spirit. Of course, here and there the glimpse is of a slightly different kind -- as into a mirror held up to the more dubious aspects of our human nature, just so we won't be too surprised if a bump or two awaits us on the road. Although this is one of those, it is still my favorite of the letters, for reasons that I expect parents especially will understand:
Did You Really Mean Do Unto Others As They Do Unto You, Because If You Did Then I'm Going to Fix My Brother. Darla